Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ali Elwell Zaiac, who grew up in Bennington and now lives in Washington, D.C. She holds a master’s in theological studies, where her thesis focused on the church’s role in strengthening small town community institutions.
Whether you have visited in Vermont for a week, or, like mine, your family has been here for several generations, you have probably noticed that most every working person you interact with seems to be aging. The fresh faces behind the counter or operating the machines are fewer and farther between.
A generation of kids who grow up here have left the state for better job prospects and cheaper housing. And in their place, no one came. The state hasn’t done enough to attract other Americans to move here. We have to ask ourselves, what do other states have that we are missing? What are we doing wrong such that so many like me moved away?
One thing we did is prevent Vermonters from building enough housing, both in growing areas around Burlington and the smaller towns in the rest of the state. It was the result of hundreds of individual selectboard decisions that codified what we had, leaving little room for what we’d need in the future.
Vermont has always prided itself on our greenery and natural feel to the state. And we can keep it that way by allowing compact, dense development where people want it. Mandatory single-family home zoning in Vermont today doesn’t protect our land, it just makes us live more spread out than we’d like. By allowing everyone to have an extra apartment for college grads or grandma, we could increase the amount of homes without straining our resources much more at all. Letting homeowners easily convert their properties to rental units could provide places for returning young people who can’t afford down payments in their now-expensive hometowns. And these small changes could be the spark to our communities and their economies need.
This gets even more important as we look to the future. Climate change is going to cause people to seek homes on higher ground, and that means pressure to build here. Making it easier to build now will allow developers to have the homes ready for any demographic change to come
Many in Vermont’s political history have argued that building more densely, will take away from the beautiful serenity that make the Green Mountain State so special. But nobody is proposing high-rises in the Northeast Kingdom. We’re talking scale like four-floor apartment buildings, maybe eight or 10 in Burlington, complemented by subdivided farmhouses, new townhomes and small apartments.
A final question, would be, what about the culture?
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “if you’re born in Vermont, you’re a Vermonter.” This is true, however, with this philosophy it creates an us v. them mentality, one that encouraged us to lock our state in amber with Act 250 and the zoning changes its mentality spawned. But no room for vacationing New York and Massachusetts residents meant no room for the next generation of Vermont natives too.
The state of Vermont is at a crossroads. In 2004, we were listed as the only state on the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust put Vermont on its list, saying suburban sprawl was encroaching on the state’s “special magic.” The way we stop that is allowing the land we’ve already built on to house more people. We chose not to do that in the past, it ended with a state my generation can’t afford to move back to. Our state, and our many selectboards can choose something different if they see fit.
